Warming Up
by Starkreactor
Summary: Coulson watches as Captain America is excavated and thawed from the ice, thinking about what made this legend so important to him in the first place. NOT SLASH. One Shot.


I personally am very annoyed that we never get a scene in which Captain America actually gets thawed out. I also dislike the distinct lack of any effort to make a remotely plausible explanation for how Steve survived the ice in the first place. So I'm trying to fill that gap.

Also Couson feels. Be warned.

* * *

"Hello?"

"Agent? I'm going to need you to come in directly."

Coulson looked over to his clock, squinting at the LED display. It was three A.M. He sat up, his shorts and T-shirt rumpled and worn from sleep, cell pressed to the side of his head. Director Fury wouldn't have called him if it wasn't vitally important. "What is it? What happened?" He asked, even as he struggled to get his pants and shoes on with one hand. He knew he should just wait for orders or a briefing, but Fury was closer to him than most and the worry was knotting in his stomach.

"Nothing bad, at ease." Fury said, his strong voice reassuring. "But you'll want to be here."

"Sir?"

"We found him."

Coulson froze, his shirt half on and half off, his tie hanging around his neck.

They found him.

It took Coulson a record ten minutes to get to base as opposed to the normal forty, the distinct lack of traffic and law enforcement at three in the morning aiding his travel. When he arrived, he ran inside, down six flights of stairs, through three tunnels and across five catwalks before reaching the lab Fury had directed him towards. Once there, he stopped, right outside the clear glass doors, the object of his excitement blocked by scientists in white coats.

He paused, feeling suddenly very nervous. He padded himself down, feeling like he couldn't possibly approach in such a state. He breathed deeply, trying to calm himself and straightened his tie, pawing nervously at his hair to force it into a tidy arrangement. Straightening up, he took a final deep breath and cleared his throat, walking through the doors like the controlled and calm agent he was, aware of the way his heart was pounding against the cards that he had still tucked in his breast pocket from earlier.

"Agent." Fury nodded to him, his face holding its usual stoic appearance, but his eye betraying how excited he himself was.

"Director." Coulson nodded respectfully, approaching the table and looking past the scientists as they parted, giving him a spot right at the figure's side.

Coulson felt the muscles in his throat clench painfully and he tried to swallow past the lump that had built. The man laying on the table in front of him looked peaceful, quiet.

Sleeping.

But sleeping was not something that Coulson knew he was doing. He was encased in a block of ice a foot thick, and had been for the past seventy years.

Coulson knew Captain America had been lost, but he never dreamed that in his lifetime they would find him again. They had searched so many times, but it took a classified event in which Bruce Banner unleashed the Hulk in the artic that broke the ice and revealed his resting place.

Now at last, Agent Phil Coulson could meet the body of the man who inspired him to go on after his father's death and his mother's suicide. He could meet the hero he wanted to grow up to emulate and honor.

He only wished he could tell him how much he had influenced him, how when he was sixteen and thought there was nothing else left in the world it was the Captain's legacy that kept him from taking his own life.

Made him see that there were people that still needed help and he could do things to help them.

That he wasn't completely powerless.

Coulson tried desperately to swallow the tightness, but the sight of his boyhood hero perfectly preserved in the ice was too much for him to completely suppress and a tear trickled down his cheek before he could dash it away. Fury noticed, but paid him the respect of saying nothing.

"Agent, if I could, I would like to talk to you in private." Fury said, nodding towards the corner of the room and away from the scientists who busily worked to thaw the ice around the Captain's body.

Coulson nodded, reluctant to tear himself away. He obeyed though, and followed Fury to the corner.

"Forgive me for waking you up now?" Nick joked once they were out of ear shot.

Coulson couldn't repress a smile and he nodded, laughing some. "Yes. I'm- I'm very honored sir." He said, his voice strangled with emotion he tried desperately to control.

"Well, I don't want to get your hopes up, but when they found the Captain in the ice there was a temperature anomaly." Fury had his arms folded and he looked at Coulson with significance.

"An anomaly?" Coulson repeated, trying not to allow himself to think what his brain desperately wanted to. It was impossible.

Fury nodded. "A slight rise in temperature. Not much, but high enough. They won't be able to get an accurate reading until they get a few more inches of ice off of him, but it appears as though there is a possibility his body wasn't completely frozen through."

Coulson didn't dare to hope, but he glanced back at the body where water was slowly trickling down the ice to the floor with every pass of the heat bows over the prone body.

"I just wanted you to be aware." Fury said. "In case something happens that you weren't prepared for." Without further explication Fury walked back over to the scientists, hands clasped behind his back as he watched from above. Coulson headed back and joined him, but on the level below. He wanted to be nearby when the last layers of ice were melted away from his tattered uniform and still face.

With the conditions in the room as they were, it took less than an hour before the scientists had taken down enough ice to get a core temperature reading. The scientist who did immediately turned to Fury, beckoning him over.

"Sir, his core temperature is thirty-four point six and rising." He said, unsure of what to make of the strange anomaly.

Fury nodded and Coulson's heart leapt at the next words. "Bring me a medical team for standby to lab sixteen."

By the time the doctors got there with the equipment previously supposed to be needed, they had melted the ice from almost the entire top half of Caps' body and the doctors moved in, causing Coulson to hold his breath as they moved around him, re-taking his core temperature and whispering among themselves. One doctor held a scanner over the Captain's face and chest, the only parts thawed from the ice and she started.

"Sir, we have reason to believe that-" She paused, re-checking the data, unable to believe what the machine was telling her. "That Captain Rogers may still be alive. There is still a trace electrical current running through his body."

Coulson's heart was in his throat at the implications and he had to lean against the railing in front of him. He tried to suppress the possibility in case they were wrong, or worse, in case they were right only to have him die on the table.

It was only when they had all of the ice drained away and were able to unzip the top of his uniform and pull back the cloth without tearing skin that Coulson began to hope. The Cap was now on several monitors that all showed contradictory information, but any information was progress. His temperature continued to rise with careful regulation, and the EEG they had him hooked up to showed very low almost sub-coma levels of activity. The mere fact that there _was_ activity astounded everyone. So far no one had detected a heartbeat of any kind or even a trace of him breathing, but if his brain was still functioning there was hope.

Coulson waited anxiously as they continued to dry him and warm him up. The warmer he got the more monitors they attached, and it was only moments after they decided to hook him up to a pulse oximiter that the dull flat line spiked into a little half-peak of life.

Coulson was so overwhelmed he had to cover his mouth with his hand and squeeze his eyes shut, waiting for the next beep, the next peak in the little green line.

Two minutes and twenty seconds later there was another beep.

Slowly, sluggishly, Steven Roger's remarkable body began to wake up. It was forty minutes after his heart started beating again that they realized he was breathing. It was twenty minutes after that that the Captain's blood oxygen levels were good and his temperature was almost normal, his pulse at a healthy thirty-two.

Moments that passed like a blur in Coulson's mind swept through and turned the legend before him from a corpse in the ice to a living, breathing human being that the doctors wasted no time on changing into clean clothes and tucking into a proper hospital bed, as soon as they determined that moving him would not jar his delicate state and stop a heart that was just remembering how to beat again.

It was seven in the morning on a Sunday when Agent Phil Coulson got to stand next to the hospital bed of Captain Steven Rogers, the doctors gone off to study the little pieces of information they had extracted and scanned from the super soldier in an attempt to guess how he had survived. Coulson knew of course. Knew that his higher metabolism must have kept him warm long enough for the ice to surround him in layer after layer of insulation, stopping his core and vital organs from freezing completely. That insulation kept his body preserved and sleeping for seventy years, and, as the doctors said from the brain scans, preserved the man inside as well.

But that didn't matter. What mattered was that the room was drawn and quiet and Coulson was standing in front of the man responsible for preserving the lives of hundreds during the war and at least one since.

Phil stood at the foot of the bed for a long time, still finding it amazing and difficult to believe that he was seeing the living form of his idol, asleep in the bed as though just home on leave. He clenched his jaw, feeling tears well up in his eyes, and this time he didn't bother to dash them away.

Walking slowly to the bedside table, Coulson took a set of dogtags from around his neck and fingered them slowly, staring down at the beat edges and the immortal engraving.

Coulson

_Jason S. _

_452-77-2411_

_A POS_

_Catholic_

He clenched them in his fist, looking over at the Captain and reason for going on after his father gave everything. Slowly, solemnly, Coulson lay the tags on the table, the metal clinking softly.

"He would have wanted you to have them." He said softly. "He enlisted because of you. And he would have wanted to thank you for taking care of his son when he couldn't." He said softly, sliding his fingers from the tags for the last time. Looking at the super solider one more time, Coulson stood a little straighter and squared his shoulders.

Silently, he saluted.


End file.
